Lady Black
by Lesera128
Summary: She was born the daughter of Ted Tonks & Andromeda Black, but she died the daughter of Lord Voldemort because of the murder of her husband & the loss of her heart. AU. RL&NT. Oneshot. Complete.


LADY BLACK  
By: Lesera128  
Rated: PG-13

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Everything Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling. 

A/N:One/Shot: This is a somewhat dark piece which is a Remus/Tonks standalone. It is set several years after the end of the Second War.

The name with which I was born is unimportant. Indeed, when I compare the identity which I possessed at birth with the new personage I chose for myself after my rebirth, my humble beginnings mean little in the grand scheme of things. However, for the purposes of understanding who I am now and how I came to be such an individual, I will speak of things which have remained quietly buried within my mind for many years. Everyone of whom I speak has been gone for sometime anyway. Only their memories remain... except for my Lord father who is ever with me. And, so I shall begin with the woman who gave me life, the woman who was my first mother.

I suppose she meant well when she bequeathed to me my very first gift in this world... I know little of her intentions. I can only suppose that in gifting me with the familial moniker she had hopes that my mixed blood would give me a strength which her ancestors had lacked, and that I might be able to break the tragic cycle which had dominated the women of her lineage for so long.

There have been so many women of our heritage who have been blessed and cursed with similar names such as the one which I have borne since I the moment I first drew breath... regal names inspired by the mythic tragedies of Ancient Greece….

Cassiopeia.

Amphitrite.

Persephone.

Hera.

Phaedra.

Thetis.

Medea.

Ariadne.

Andromeda.

...and so many other names that have now been mercifully forgotten.

Aside from being a part of the same genetic line as myself, the women who bore these names shared many other commonalties with me.

All of them were beautiful, indeed they were the most beautiful women of their times; their flawless beauty was almost too perfect, all things considered. Over the years, some have said that the excessive amounts of beauty with which women of my line have been graced has resulted in the loss of our ability to feel. We are women who are beautiful, but like fine marble sculptures, we are cold and inflexible in our beauty. Some have said that the gods stripped us of our ability to feel emotion when we were blessed with crystalline blue eyes, high cheek bones, flawless skin the color of pale pearls, and hair so smooth and silky its long black tresses look blue.

For a long time, I thought that what they said was right. I thought that my ability to feel had been stolen from me at the age of four when I watched my Aunt Bellatrix slit my mother's throat.

Ahh, Aunt Bella. My second mother. Over the years, I have both loved her so much and hated her so passionately that I didn't know where one emotion began and the other ended. My Aunt Bella was a remarkable woman. She had her faults to be sure, but if it hadn't been for her, I never would have survived. She had a keen eye for assessing potential, and it was the analysis that she conducted on the night that she murdered my mother that saved my life. You can say many things about my Aunt Bella, but she was willing to overlook my diluted blood given my potential. I think that is one thing she learned from her master... our master, but I digress.

As I was saying, I had always thought my heart had been stolen the night I watched the ruby red droplets of my mother's blood rain down upon me as Aunt Bella said, "Remember, Nymphadora, this is what happens to blood traitors. This is what happens to those who betray their family. This is what happens to those who make the WRONG decision."

And, then, she handed me the bejeweled gold dagger, dripping in glittering diamonds, sparkling sapphires, vibrant emeralds, and the shining ruby red droplets of my mother's blood, and said, "Keep this, Nymphadora, and always remember."

And I always have.

As I've gotten older, I always wondered if I traded my heart away the night I accepted that dagger. On the night I saw my aunt murder her sister, my mother, my father disappeared. I never saw him again, and truth to be told, I never even asked about him. Over the years, vague memories of a smiling man with soft blonde hair and warm brown eyes has faded because I lost the only thing he had given me... my heart. Before today, I never even saw the irony that on the day I lost my father, I lost my heart. Why is it so ironic? Well, simply put, my heart is the one thing that I had inherited from a mudblood father who, in his resentful imperfections, gifted his daughter with the one thing so many of her line had been denied -- a heart, and with it, the ability to feel.

Only, it wasn't until one day, over twenty years, later that I learned that I still had a heart. On the night of my mother's death, it hadn't disappeared after all. No, it had merely been in hibernation, waiting for the right time and right person to awaken it. And, how do I know this? I sadly gained this knowledge because one day my sleeping heart awakened... and it awakened on the day I meant him.

I won't bore you with the details. For a brief time, the time I spent with him, I learned what it was like to feel again. He was my lord, and I was his lady. I would be lying if I said that people on both sides resented us... even though the war ended long ago, and his side lay shattered in the smoldering ruins of Harry Potter's rotting corpse, he was still one of their best and one of their brightest.

In the end, he only survived because of his love for me, and more importantly, my love for him. In the beginning, we kept our comings and goings secret. He was my lover, and I was his mistress. The arrangement suited us until it was discovered that we had been fraternizing for almost a year and a half. Truth to be told, I was surprised we were able to keep it a secret for that long given who he was and who I was.

As the years had passed, my Aunt Bella had taken me in and trained me from the age of four to follow in her footsteps. I was more than her protégé... I was her gift to the Dark Lord. For all intensive purposes, I was the child of Bellatrix Lestrange and Lord Voldemort. I learned to think like them, I learned to act like them. In the end, I became them. 

When my poor misplaced cousin Sirius killed Aunt Bella, I ascended to my aunt's place in the Dark Lord's world. I was only sixteen, and even then, I was the most beloved of all his Deatheaters. He was my father. I was his daughter; I was his child. My place in his affections and hierarchy was higher than that of even Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape, much to their offended chagrin.

When the war ended, there was no one and nothing I couldn't have. And, by pure accident, I decided I wanted him. I remember very clearly the day I told my Lord father about my choice. The look he gave me was odd.

"Are you sure this is what you want, my daughter?"

"He is what I want."

"But, he was Dumbledore's right-hand man."

"And, in the end, he was the one who killed Dumbledore, was he not?"

"By accident, perhaps..."

"He is a dark creature, my Lord father, as you well know. And the war is over. And, more importantly, as I said, it is **he** who I want."

My father was silent for a moment before he merely sighed in reluctant acquiescence.

"If he is your choice, then so be it."

Our wedding was held at my beloved's ancestral home. My Lord father spared no expense. And, as a wedding present, my Lord father presented to us the hereditary title, lands, and wealth of my mother's family. With the stroke of a wand, he officially became my lord, and I legally became his lady.

For a time, we were happy. For a time, I lived a life that I never knew existed, a world totally encompassed in his warm, amber eyes.

And on our wedding night, I gifted him with my most precious possession. On the night when we at last became one, I gave him my heart, and it remained his until the day he died. So long as he lived, I desperately clung to my last remaining shreds of humanity. But, when he was so cruelly ripped away from me, I at last gave over to that which my Lord father had always warned would ultimately be my fate once I started down the path I had traveled since the age of four. My beloved husband had merely been a temporary diversion, a brief distraction on the way to my final rejection of redemption.

Like my mother's death, my beloved's murder had a certain irony to it. Bitter and resentful over the death of her son, Draco, my aunt Narcissa had sought revenge against me as I had been the one in charge of the boy's education. It wasn't my fault the stupid boy wasn't strong enough to stand up to a cruciatus curse. It wasn't my fault that my Lord father had told me to train the boy to inflict the curse. And it certainly wasn't my fault that to truly understand the curse, you have to experience the pain of crucio and learn to embrace that experience.

Draco's accidental passing was a sad happenstance, of course, but my Aunt Narcissa should have known better than to try to fight me... especially in using my beloved against me. Didn't she know that as long as he was alive, some amount of tenderness might have softened my retaliation against her?

My Lord father took immediate action. The house elf and Narcissa were brought to me immediately. "Do with them what you will, my daughter. They are yours," he said. There was nothing that Lucius could do for Narcissa.

And, in the end, I was much more kind to Narcissa than the bloody house elf had been to my beloved. I remember the proud blue eyes, so like mine, staring back at me as I held the jeweled dagger which had killed my mother in front of Aunt Narcissa. Now, in addition to being covered in her dried blood, my beloved's stained the blade. Narcissa said nothing when I showed her the blade. I merely shrugged, pocketed the blade, withdrew my wand, and blatantly illustrated to Narcissa why my Lord father had wanted me personally to tutor Draco in ways and nuances of the cruciatus curse. In the end, I suppose it must have been his mother from which Draco inherited his inability to fight the curse as Narcissa died even more quickly under my wand than did her son.

After Narcissa was dead, that left only one other thing with which to deal... the elf.

I had thought long and hard on how to punish my beloved's murderer. And, in the end, I chose the time honored tradition started by my Aunt Elladora.

"You will bring me the ax, Kreacher," I said calmly one day.

The old house elf whispered, "Ye...yes, mistress."

"And make sure it's sharp."

"Right away, mistress."

Of course, when I'm done with him, his head won't be adorning the wall with the rest of the family house elves at Grimmauld Place. No, for Kreacher a particularly gruesome fate awaits. I've always wondered what color blood a house elf bleeds. I suppose today I am going to find out, because with the death of my beloved, my heart died too.

Only this time, it won't be found again. It is gone for good. Just as he is lost, so is it.

And for some reason, my Lord father seems unusually sad about it, for now there is no doubt -- I am, and always shall be, Lady Black.


End file.
